Special to The Seattle Times
"Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz
Baroness"
by David Kastin
W.W. Norton, 272 pp., $26.95
Pannonica Rothschild — called Nica — tried very hard
to be an upstanding member of the famous banking family. She went to the right
schools, married the right man (a French baron, no less) and had five children.
Ultimately, though, she couldn't do it. Seduced by
jazz, she fled to New York and became patron to dozens of musicians, most
famously Thelonious Monk.
Her fascinating life is the subject of "Nica's
Dream," the second recent effort to tell this story; two years ago, Nica's
grandniece, Hannah Rothschild, produced a documentary, "The Jazz
Baroness," which covered much of the same ground.
Both the film and David Kastin's book ascribe
Rothschild's willingness to give up a life of privilege to the difficulty
growing up a female Rothschild, of whom nothing more was expected than being a
wife and mother.
The filmmaker does a better job describing what it was
like growing up a Rothschild. Growing up on an English estate, young Nica
(1913-1988) was not only offered a choice of breakfast milk — but from which
breed of cow it came. Dinner guests were offered fruit directly from miniature
trees carried in by servants.
Author Kastin, however, does a superior job in placing
her in the context of the milieu. This was a time when no proper white woman,
let alone a wealthy baroness, would so openly associate with black people and
when jazz "was perceived as a serious threat not only to the prevailing
social order, but to the integrity of Western culture, itself," he writes.
Nica was also a proto-feminist. She learned to fly when just 21 and was a
medal-winning war hero (as was her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswater), driving
an ambulance during WW II.
After the war she accompanied her husband, who joined
the diplomatic service of the new French government and was posted to Oslo,
Norway, and Mexico. But after the excitement of wartime service, it was
impossible to settle down. She made frequent trips to New York. On one such
trip, pianist Teddy Wilson (she'd met him years earlier through her brother)
insisted she listen to a recording of " 'Round Midnight," by a
newcomer — Thelonious Monk.
"I had never heard anything remotely like
it," she's quoted as saying. I made him play it 20 times in a row. [It]
affected me like nothing else I ever heard."
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